Mr. Massing failed to mention just what the arguments would be that made Obama's policies or his judgements better supported than what Glenn recommends. I thought bbebop, one of Brad DeLong's commenters, suggested a very plausible argument. That person said this,

"...glenn greenwald isn't balanced. he's got a specific point of view, and argues it incessantly. hey, he may even be right.

but what he's not is a politician or policy maker. and what he's not doing is balancing his argument against the political harm that may (or may not) be caused by pursuing it.

suppose prosecuting the bushies for torture made the political environment so toxic that it doomed obama's pursuit of, say, health care reform, energy+environmental reform, democratic control of congress in the 2010 elections, or obama's reelection in 2012?

those are clearly the kind of calculations the administration is making. they may be wrong (as in not realistic results of prosecutions). they may be not what glenn or any of us would consider. but please don't pretend that's not what's going on."

I take bbebop to be saying that the Obama people are being threatened, there's a price they'll have to pay if any prosecutions go through. That price will be that none of his other proposals will ever see the light of day.

I take this to be a fair suggestion, partly because, if true, it wouldn't be the kind of consideration you'd want to admit to.

It is just this kind of consideration, though, that made today's post dissatisfying. Yes, it's a terrible thing that our leaders and the Press are "dispensing" with our core constitutional principles, but it isn't their "dispensing" that makes them ignore the law, or think that Glenn is impractical.

The problem is that the playground is run by a bully and that bully steals our lunch money. The problem for us isn't the sad fact that people are not playing by the rules, which is what Glenn seems to be concerned about when he argues for the "rule of law." The problem is that the bully steals from us, and that breaks the rules. The problem necessarily involves the fact that there's a bully and he's stealing lunch money and no one seems able to stand up to him. That is, as I've said, you can't make the bully do something he doesn't want to do.

Glenn's argument is dissatisfying because he points out that people are not playing by the rules, a symptom perhaps, and does not get at the fact that the bully is stealing, or, the disease.

I suspect Glenn has a strategy. It might be that he's starting out with the idea that we should all follow the rules. And then, he'll peel the onion of this problem away to show more and more of how corrupt and deep the problem is. Eventually he will expose the corporations or the politicians or the media stars for the bullies or the puppets that they are.

Maybe he'll try to expose them, and the purifying rays of the sun will somehow make them wither away. However, it may turn out that people will just acknowledge that it's a playground and the bully rules, and live with it. C. Todd does. Apparently, Massing does.

The point here is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. If you can't get bullies to agree to play nice, the job of democracy, then you might constrain them with rules, Glenn's method. If these strategies don't work, then one might try to figure out why we have bullies, and persuade them that there are other values in life.

After all, some people think that the solution to the bully question is to get people to go to church.

I am interested to hear why exposing wrongdoing is the best way to stop this kind of wrong-doer.